Can the Tories be the party of the working class?

Oh goodie! “London rents at record levels as buyers fight for mortgages.” Another victory for trickle-down economics! My advice to anyone trying to get on the London property ladder in the next few years is to first try to get hold of a Russian industry. Not necessarily one of the major ones – aluminium will probably do – but by becoming an oligarch you'll definitely ensure being able to buy at least a three-bedroom flat in Hackney next to a council estate.

Here’s a bald statistic from his book, Red Tory: in 1976 the bottom 50 per cent of the population owned 12 per cent of non-propertied wealth; by 2003 it was one per cent.

Meanwhile the median wage of the average British worker has not increased in 40 years, although productivity has, massively, meaning that people are required to buy more things with the same income.

And so to maintain growth, wage earners are lent ever larger amounts of money, plunging large sections of society hopelessly into debt.

This is surely dangerous. It’s not a question of the peasants at the gates burning down the aristocrat's house; more that, if the peasants no longer have any cash or credit they won’t be able to buy the goods and services that pay for the house. Some economists believe inequality helped to bring about the 1929 crash and point to statistics showing the US at its most unequal since the Wall St Crash. Whether or not that is true, inequality on both sides of the Atlantic has grown steadily, in our case despite massive and unsustainable increases in welfare and other forms of redistribution.

Many Conservatives are genuinely interested in alleviating poverty, it is true, but Blond seems to be one of the few concerned about the problems related to inequality.

Where Blond stops being red and gets a bit Tory is in his analysis of the social problems aggravating inequality.

Almost all the great liberal social movements of the late 1960s have widened the gap between rich and poor. Whether it’s easier divorce, cohabitation, increased acceptability of drug use, immigration, liberal policing, progressive education and even de-Christianisation, they’ve all been mixed blessings, but they’re clearly changes the wealthy can handle much better than the poor.

Blond’s hero is clearly Benjamin Disraeli, who for a time made the Tories the natural party of the working class. With the Left’s social policies completely failing to help the poor, could they do it again?